


maquisarde

by principessa



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Age Changes, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Captain America: The First Avenger, Coming of Age, Female Friendship, French Resistance, Gen, Growing Up, Historical, POV Female Character, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 18:49:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4972261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>your name is jacqueline dernier, and you are seventeen years old when you go to war for your country.</p><p>or, the war and the things that happened after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	maquisarde

**Author's Note:**

> under the vichy government, it was often the young high school and college aged students who took part in the resistance efforts. under the post-war provisional government, women were granted the right to vote as compensation for their participation in the resistance effort. 
> 
> it is generally assumed that women delivered tracts, opened their parlors to resistance meetings, and prepared explosives, while men placed them and fought in the maquis. 
> 
> (this is, of course, a generalization.)

i.

you’re riding your bike into town to pick up the weekly rations (maman couldn’t come, she was too busy taking care of henri, things have been so _difficult_ since papa was deported) and you see them in the streets, walking and chatting and acting as if the country weren’t at fucking war. the maréchal promises peace, and marseille rings as the people laud him as a savior, chanting praises from door to door; in the wilderness not fifty kilometers out of the city there are young boys and girls laying their lives down for their freedom, and they don’t even acknowledge it. 

(of course, acknowledging it is illegal, and nobody would put themselves in danger. not with the gestapo around every corner. not when your neighbours listen through the floor to see who tunes into bbc, who tunes into illegal radio stations, who comes and goes at strange times.) 

you jump off your bike, skirt flaring dangerously high, tie it up wordlessly and get in line. no one comments – how could they? it’s not like anyone has the ressources for long skirts anymore anyways, and you can justify yourself by saying it’s the heat, but it’s part of a rebellion. the government spins a story of an idealized woman, mother of sixteen, who goes to church twice a day and leaves the work to the men. modest and domestic, domesticated and obediant. it’s ridiculous: the men are all gone, sent to work for the germans, which makes both baby-making and being an at-home mother rather difficult. 

the line moves slowly. you have enough tickets for – you glance down at your steady hands – two kilograms of flour, a box of rutabagas, two hundred grams of butter. you’ll be able to fit it all in your bicycle basket, and you sigh at the thought. maman is thinking of sending you and henri to the countryside with grandmère, where the apricot trees still miraculously drop fruit, and where the bomber planes aren’t so loud during the night. london had been evacuated, when the war started, you think; this wouldn’t be so different. 

except that it would make your life so, _so_ much harder: you wouldn’t be able to steal chemicals from the school laboratory anymore, scrap metal from the rubble of demolished houses (the inhabitants all deported, family by family, and the city is getting so _empty_ ), twisting wires and sticking them together with chewing gum when you got desperate. you wouldn’t be able to hand them off to your cousins, wrapped in a linen napkin as if they were bits of bread and jam. you wouldn’t know that one more train, one more shipment of weapons, one more caravan of soldiers had been stopped. 

if you get sent to the countryside, you think, you’ll go and place them yourself. your little brother will play in the fields, quietly aware that something is wrong, and grandmère will knit and fret and silently cry about your father while you try to hold yourself together. you will put on your work trousers and boots and go to war. 

in the meantime, you move forward in the rations line, and try not to wince when they mention pétain by name. 

ii. 

émile is something of the uncle you never had – not that you don’t have uncles, that is, god knows that you have enough of those. but émile is something else, something between family friend and older brother, that uncharacterizeable title of ‘maman’s ex-boyfriend’. he was one of the first to leave, when de gaulle called to arms from across the channel; when the régime decided that any who listened to radio londres would be executed for treason. with nothing but a transistor to keep him company, he vanished into the maquis like the rest of them, nameless freedom fighters who believed in liberty. 

(he came back. papa did not. you stop being bitter about this very quickly: there isn’t time for bitterness, not between the relief and the hollowness and the shock. and afterwards, you become just like the rest of the soldiers, the fighters, the victims, philosophizing about it because there’s nothing else you can do, after seeing and doing what you have seen and done.) 

you spent three months in the factory, (labor camp, your brain supplies each time, but no, it will always be _the factory_ to you) and you were gone for three months before that, returning to the farm every once and a while for food, supplies, to leave word with grandmère before vanishing again. you hear from him for the first time four months after you first started working with the commandos, and it has been nearly a year since your family had heard from you. 

it goes like this: you are in camp, and morita has allowed you free reign of the radio set in exchange for your chewing gum ration and a pack of cigarettes you won at cards. you’re trying to hit radio alger, honestly, or any resistant radio station you can find, but when the static crackles to life and you hear his voice, you think the old you would have sobbed. this you doesn’t, though, because it would be embarassing and childish, and the war has hardened you enough that crossing aquaintences is nothing more than business. you were arrested with a boy who you’ve known since kindergarten. he died before you even reached the factory. your old postman shared your workstation, when you’re put to work building bombs for them. you kept on marching then, head up; and you will keep on marching until the war ends. 

but émile – émile, you weren’t expecting, and you freeze. it attracts attention, to say the least, and you have to force casualness into your tone when you ask morita if you can answer. urgency bleeds through all the same ( _“it’s my uncle”_ ) and your hands are steady as always when you turn the dial to speak. he is shocked into silence for a good ten seconds, before he’s quiet, incredulous, confident, _“linette?”_ and you somehow manage not to laugh when you answer _“midas,”_ because he had wanted his partisan name to be cultural and suave. you ask him about marseille, about fabien, about maman and henri and grandmère. you tell him, curtly, that you were deported, but that you’re with the yanks now. and finally, that time is short, but – has he heard from papa, yet? 

and his voice is pitying and heartfelt when he tells you that, oh, darling, your maman recieved a letter two months ago. you hate him for it, and you don’t make a sound, tell him that you won’t check in too often, for safety, but that you’ll try. _vive la république_ , he says when he signs off, and usually you would laugh at his history jokes, but you are filled with a rage that you don’t have time for. 

maman has mourned a husband and a nephew and a daughter, for months and years and centuries and days. you have mourned your childhood and your democracy and the softness of your hands. fabien mourned his twin, his soul-half, and the men who share a camp with you have mourned their innocence and their clean souls. you are tired of mourning, so you burn with an anger that is white-hot, bright. mourning comes later, in a boarding house in paris with running makeup and a wet newspaper umbrella, but that’s a story for another time. 

iii. 

you could have gone home, you reckon. you did it. you liberated paris, a mob of angry citizens and the commandos, your compatriots and your liberators. french and americans alike rejoiced, afterwards, and the announcement on radio alger haunts you for years afterwards. _pariiiiiis est liiiiiibre!_ when you heard it, ringing out from every radio in the city, you had staggered against a wall, and wept. exhaustion, mourning, joy, even now you wouldn’t be able to define your tears, but you remember that barnes had offered you a wry smile and gabriel had scooped you up like a child. your band of war-brothers entered a great many bars over the course of that night, and you crossed the threshold of the first perched on his back, arms crossed and resting on his head. 

you could have gone home, afterwards; hugged them all as tight as possible, give them each your address and extract a promise to write, and hitch-hiked back to marseille, easy as anything. you could have fallen into your mother’s arms, traced the new lines on her face with your fingertips, run them through your little brother’s hair. 

instead, you insisted on helping them like they helped you, but that was only ever half of your reasoning; you’re not above admitting that you were still sanguine enough to want revenge, still hopeful enough to want peace. clear-headed enough to want hydra off the face of the globe, forever. so you take a shower when one is offered to you, and when the dizzyness from the alcohol and euphoria fades, you fix your casquette (you found a new one) and look at the captain expectantly, _where to next, cap?_

would you have been told, you wonder, about what happened? you didn’t see barnes fall himself, but gabriel did, and his face has since engraved itself into your memory. rogers’ was worse – you think that he has lost his soul-half, too – and he followed not long after. between the two, though, was days on days of digging through snow in the alps, fingertips freezing since you never did get gloves with full fingers and barnes wasn’t around to scold you for it anymore. gabriel would have told you, eventually, you think, sent you a letter perhaps. and you would have sat in your bedroom with your old quilt and other vestiges of an ancient you, and pressed it to your chest and marveled that war still took people from you when things were supposed to be over. 

(ha. as if you had any idea. the war took everyone from everyone, and your generation spent decades rebuilding itself person by person to get over it.) 

as it was, you didn’t go home when you could have, so when you hugged them and handed out address slips and caught a ride back on the hood of a jeep, you did it to four men instead of six, and you thought, blankly, that it was strange how people can be part of your life for such a short time and leave such an influence. 

but with your head back and your hair flying where it escaped from your scarf, with the starry sky above you and home in front of you, you put thoughts of tragic american men out of your mind and started thinking about what was most important. 

iv. 

your desk is cluttered, which will probably earn you a telling-off by the nuns tomorrow morning. it’s raining, and your copy of _Le Monde_ is soggy on the last empty piece of table-space from where you used it to cover your hair as you ran back from class. 

it is nineteen-forty-seven, and you are twenty-one years old in three weeks. your desk is covered in lipstick tubes and sheet music, loose-leaf study notes covered in equations and neatly-labeled schematics, letters from maman and émile and letters from gabriel and jim and falsworth. (dum dum doesn’t write nearly as much, but you don’t mind too much. you never expected to make a large impact on their lives, and you’re flattered that the others have kept in contact this long. perhaps you’ll stay friends forever, a battle-bond forged in blood that cannot be broken despite distance and time. perhaps they feel guilty. you don’t particularly care.) 

the typewriter you bought second hand for a hundred francs off a market-stall owner on the banks of the seine, and it hasn’t failed you yet! you keep candles in your desk drawer, an engrained habit from the war and the darkness of the blackouts. there are pages ripped from fashion magazines carefully stuck to the wall, and sewing patterns you like, but it feels like a shoe that doesn’t quite fit. you’re not sure who you are anymore, jackie or jacqueline or frenchie or mademoiselle dernier. you’re trying to find an identity here in paris, under rainy overcast skies and with classmates who can’t help but scoff at your accent. they don’t even know that provencal is a language; they’ve never left the capital. they’ve never been to war, for the most part. 

(it’s taboo to ask people what they did during the war, and you burn with it. _i fought,_ you want to yell, _i fought and killed and watched people die. i crafted explosives with these two hands and watched as infrastructures came crashing down upon themselves. i kept watch while captain america slept, and drank in this very bar on the shoulders of a man named gabriel jones._ ) 

oh, but everyone is a partisan, now, never mind that you remember them all singing pétain’s praises well enough. you talk, and you’ve been on the radio once or twice, written articles for fabian’s paper. tied together with string next to the typewriter is a draft for a book, a memoir, a peace treaty and an aggressive retelling of the truth, a sorrowful lament, a passing bubblegum-colored memory of the boys splashing around in a stream. 

you are so tired, and fabian rarely has a kind word to offer you since you found his brother’s corpse still warm in the snow. last time you met up for drinks, you both ended up drunk in the gutter, huddled for warmth and sharing a disgusting cigarette while he called you a whore and you called him a child. gabriel writes letters, and jim sends postcards, and you think you would like to see them again but the idea itches like pulling at a bandaid. you still don’t know if you want to cut all ties and get on with your life, or if the looping english words are the only thing keeping you sane. 

you cry into your hands for the fourth time this week for a record twenty minutes, before getting up and going to the shower. you cross your roommate colette in the hallway, and when you make eye contact, you know she understands. there are numbers burned into her arm, and you’re hit with a rush of mild shame when you think that she has more reason to cry than you do. that’s the thing, though: you don’t know who you are quite yet, but nobody else does, either. so here you are together, twenty-five girls in a catholic boarding house, going to mass on sunday and doing charity work in exchange for lodgings while you get an education. half of the girls are jewish. none of you can go back home, for one reason or another. 

you understand each other, and unlike outside, it isn’t a contest of who suffered the worse tragedy. you mourn and eat in the dining hall and share stockings and eyelash curlers and catch the metro together and whine about homework. you build yourselves up from the ground. head up and hands steady, you take the time to walk, even though you’ll never forget how to march. 

v. 

your hands didn’t shake when you started piano at four, or during your first gymnastics lesson at six. they didn’t shake for your first chemistry project, or as you built your first bomb of many. throughout the war you could always count on your hands to be steady, whether you were sticking a man with a knife or shooting him with a gun, whether you were scaling factory walls or building bombs for the enemy, for the ally. it comes as no surprise, then, that they don’t shake on your first day as a professor. 

it’s a triumph that you savior slowly even now. a double-diploma in chemistry and engineering, and a teaching position in the best girl’s school in france, with regular invites as a guest lecturer to the boy’s school up the road and to la sorbonne. back when you were still twenty-one and would walk in two’s and three’s down rue d'ulm, the norm sup boys would call and whistle as you walked past since sèvriennes were something desireable. now, they stare at you with something between awe and admiration, firmly anchored in respect. you never did get any taller, but you’ve since learned to walk in high heels, and you still find the time to follow the fashions despite the chalk dust that inevitably gets on your skirts. 

your hands are forever steady as you apply a fresh coat of nail color, as you take off your cat-eye sunglasses, as you cover the amphitheater blackboards with equations and schematics and notes and assignments. 

you were in your last year of your diploma when you met james, and you remember thinking that it was funny, how many jameses affected your life. the son of an egyptian embassador to england, studying at la sorbonne in political science and literature. he has dark skin and darker eyes and the brightest smile, and your hands were steady when you shared secret glances, when you dragged one another by the hand through the city to find its hidden life-filled crannies. 

you are twenty-seven and your hands are steady and he puts a ring on your finger. you keep your last name for work, because you published your book under the name dernier, and it was with the name dernier that you pushed yourself through years of studies and hard work and tears, and that lost girl you were in a war-wrecked world deserves to have this much, at least. but your children are born with the name nazari, and your passport compromises by putting both. 

it’s a form of identity like any other, you suppose. you spend nights staying up talking about it, the two of you in your night clothes and still in the living room discussing the war, politics, what is happening in america, in the ussr, in egypt and algeria and the rest of the world. 

you still write letters to gabriel and jim and falsworth and dum-dum, and they still reply, even if dum-dum is still slow. gabriel’s french is getting rusty, in writing at least, and you needle him for it, send him conjugation exercises and a grammar book. falsworth and jim have both gotten engaged, and after checking your finances (which are more than you could have imagined, as a child) you book a ferry to england, a plane to california, and you’re eager to see them again. you’ve all met up since the war; at your wedding, and then once every five years to toast to barnes and rogers. it might be jarring, for them, to see proof that you’re growing, that you’ve grown. perhaps it isn’t. 

henri towers over you now, which is the biggest tragedy of all, honestly. 

vi. 

it’s the simple truth: you are old. james is gone (again), fabien and his wife as well. lise’s husband has passed, and your cousin yvonne never grew past sixteen, but you suppose she counts as well. maman and émile held on for a long time, but they were always stubborn, the both of them, but not even your all-powerful mother can fight time. 

your babies have long since grown old and had children of their own. little frédéric and barbara and lucien who you held, off living their lives across the globe, sparing the thought to give you a call once and a while, but not much more. 

you write to your cousins a lot, lise and germaine and paulette, calling each other every day to gossip and share news because family sticks together, after all, never mind that you never could stand the last two. henri stops by when he can, your precious little brother who never stopped having nightmares of bomb raids at the farm, and he plays the violin while you play the piano, and it feels a bit like old times, but sweeter. 

gabriel and jim are forever present, and you speak at least once a week to be safe: falsworth and dum-dum (you never did call him anything else) passed far too quickly, and you don’t want to fall out of contact before the end. you go visit peggy carter, about once a month, because she intimidated the shit out of you when you were seventeen and because god knows she could use the company. 

the grandchildren write and call sometimes, but the facts are what they are: you’re hardly as exciting as you used to be. they love to brag about it to their friends, of course, that their grandmother was a partisan and a female engineer in the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, but they chafe after spending too much time with you. 

you don’t blame them, honestly; you’ve grown out of such feelings. you live in an apartment alone with your cat (although you’ll never forget sergei) and you’re content: you can afford where you live, you go out and see expositions and museums, and you have friends at your gym who come over for coffee and cards. history students sometimes ask you for interviews for their thesis, and you can never say no, because even after all this time you never shy away from talking about the war. your children may have stopped you from getting a cane with a revolver hidden inside, but you can live with that. you may or may not have schematics for one of your own invention in the biscuit tin. 

you are old, and your hair is white, although you have been known to dye it on a whim. (when you dyed it blue, it appeared on the lifestyle section of the news. do they not have anything better to talk about, with everything that’s going on in the world?) your hands are steady, except for the days when they’re not. they shake, sometimes; the whole world seems to shake, at times, and you swallow your medecine the same way you once gritted your teeth through bullet wounds – except nothing at all like that. 

the war ended in nineteen-forty-five. it is two-thousand and twelve, and you haven’t been at war with yourself in decades. 

(and then you go and see steve rogers on the damn news, and you track the boy down and go at him with your handbag, because you are too fucking old for this and he didn’t even think to call. at least barnes comes around for tea and biscuits, but then again, you always did have a soft spot for him. not to mention that god knows the poor man deserves a hot drink and a cookie after what he went through.) 

it might be the nostalgia talking, or that you’ve gone daft in your old age, but you’re thrilled that you got to see them again before you die. neither of them are fond of late-night talks and philosophizing, but that’s fine; you’ve had a lifetime to do so. they’re a hundred years old and still young. 

you hope you’ll get to see them grow.

**Author's Note:**

> old character studies posted in honor of me rebooting my rp account maquisarde @ tumblr! in this case it'll be maquisarde-archive, if you want to go check out my old posts. this is based on six months worth of canon relatives, so it might be confusing, but if anyone is interested enough i'd love to clear it up! :)


End file.
